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“God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
The death, burial, and resurrection of Christ is the most important event in human history. Our eternal destinies depend on our response to Christ’s work on the cross, in the grave, and in his ascension. We see the value of humanity to God and the lengths to which he went to make a way of deliverance from sin and death.
My current series will cover these three days. This article focuses on the cross or the death of Jesus. So much was accomplished on the cross. It’s impossible to cover it in one sermon/article. In this article, I will focus on Jesus as our sin offering. God made him like us in death so we could be made like him in life. See “The Great Exchange” for more on the exchange that took place on the cross.
Our Sin Offering
God didn’t unjustly punish Jesus instead of us, something much deeper happened. God performed the opposite transaction in Jesus that he does in us.
In him, we die to sin and are made alive, but when Jesus was made like us, he died as us. He was a man in all ways like we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), but God changed that on the cross. He made Jesus a sinner by nature. Jesus never sinned, but God made him to be sin. If he didn’t, God would be unjust in punishing our sin in Jesus.
2 Corinthians 5:21 God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
God didn’t symbolically place our sin on Jesus like an Old Covenant lamb. He quite literally made Jesus to BE sin to the core.
Romans 8:3 For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man, as an offering for sin. He thus condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the righteous standard of the law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus. The Old Covenant law demanded that sin be punished in the body of the sinner, so God had to make him like us to punish our sin fully.
1 John 2:2He Himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.
Why did God do it this way? Critics of Christianity will say something like this; God brutally sacrificed himself to himself so that he could accept humans.
That kind of thinking does not understand the authority of humankind. God gave dominion over this planet to humans. Humans brought in sin and death, so a human had to repair the breach. God is not like the Greek or Egyptian gods that sacrifice children to satisfy their anger. God is a loving father. He is a righteous judge as well, and his moral standard needed to be upheld. The Israelites asked for the law in the desert, and once it was in place, it could not just be erased. The fullness of the law had to be executed, including the full penalty for the transgression of the law.
Blood had to be shed for one reason, not a killing by a god in a fit of rage, but for the exchanging of dead human life for eternal spiritual life.
Lev 17:11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for your souls upon the altar; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.
The life of the flesh had to be killed so the life of the spirit could take its place. Blood had to be shed to atone for our souls under the Old Covenant, but for our spirits under an eternal covenant. The blood of goats and bulls could temporarily cleanse your soul, but the blood, or life, of Christ, can cleanse your spirit to make you the kind of vessel that God can inhabit, eternally.
One of the effects of his eternal atonement is that we become righteous in him. It’s not temporary righteousness, it’s now our nature. Righteousness and true holiness are our states of existence. We are no longer dead in our sins, in our spirits, our eternal identity, we are alive forever.
1 Peter 2:24 He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. “By His stripes you are healed.”
When he became like us, he was punished and died as we should have. But when we become like him, we live and experience his life.
Romans 6:10 For that which He died, He died to sin once for all; but that which He lives, He lives to God. 11 So also you, consider yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but living to God in Christ Jesus.
I will never get over the elegance of God’s plan. It was birthed in his love for us. God so loved and valued us that he crafted a plan to send his only son to die in the place of all humanity to set us free from sin and death.
While this is deeply profound, it was just the beginning. What happened in the grave was even more horrific than what Christ experienced on the cross. In my next sermon/blog I will cover what Jesus experienced in the grave once he died in our place.
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